Sign up for our weekly security newsletter

Spammers Crack Microsoft’s CAPTCHA to Create Live Hotmail Accounts

Dan Hubbard, Vice President of security research at Websense, a company specializing in software security, said that a new type of bot could break through the Microsoft Corp. created defenses that prevent spammers from opening bulk accounts on its Live Hotmail service in just seconds, as reported by ComputerWorld on April 11, 2008.

The bot penetrated through Live Hotmail's Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) in just six seconds. CAPTCHA refers to the scrambled, distorted characters that users on the Web are required to decode and key for opening a fresh account. These tests are devised to prevent spa...